I picked code up in part to get a better paying job than anything on offer in the arts. Now I have Python, Flask, and SQL with me. However, after going through job sites for a few days, I’ve discovered that most jobs are for front end developers with HTML5, CSS, and Javascript.

There is a lot of demand for Javascript using AngularJS, React, NodeJS, etc. So, the fastest way to get a job is to pick up front end web dev/design skills.

If you stick with Python and want to do some back end work, you’ll need Django, and NoSQL, typically MongoDB. Not Flask. Exceedingly few hiring companies use Flask.

Ruby on Rails appears quite a bit too. Also a lot of demand for UI/UX. But that floats into a more distant skill set.

I should close the loop on this series. Part 1 and Part 2, if you’re interested.

The conclusion is, I haven’t mastered it, but I’ve definitely figured out the basics. I thought I’d need to learn more from CS350 for some time before getting here. Instead I found myself going back to just two of the videos in Charles Severance’s “Using Databases with Python” several times and jogging memory with code I’d worked with during that course. I’m forgetful so it was great to have his videos on hand. I also spent a lot of time googling, reading, and YouTubing tutorials.

Basically, I had to draw from everywhere at this point, and the range was really, really wide.

One uses Python to concatenate randomly selected strings from various lists to form grammatically correct English sentences and then displays a new one in the middle of a webpage at regular intervals.

The other draws from the IMDB database, banishes all USA and Western European films, randomly picks 10 from the rest of the world, and displays them along with their trailers from YouTube. This one was not so trivial for me. There was a lot of junk data in the IMDB database to clean up, and I had to work out how to scrape YouTube to embed the trailers on my site.

I can’t say if it’ll continue this way. Already there are certain things that are falling into doubt. For instance, CS350 leverages AngularJS a little bit to do Flask stuff, and in the course of reading all the other sources I found out that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of AngularJS right now. That particular case is not terribly important. Just a small example. We can use other JS frameworks anyway.

What’s next for me? I’m going to build up that film site of mine. Add users to it, work on some formulae running in the back end. Get more familiar with PostgreSQL. Get a better handle on how to mash Flask up with Bootstrap. And then maybe learn Cordova next year to build mobile apps.

Coding is great fun, especially since I use it to engage real world problems. For example, the winner-takes-all effect. Films from USA and Western Europe, and especially from Hollywood, saturate almost every single one of our media environments. My film site bans all USA and Western European films in order to allow the diversity of the rest of the world’s film heritage to come to the fore. Turns out, it’s wonderful. Using it, I discovered amazing, beautiful films from Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere. I think there was even one from Antigua and Barbados. It’s not ready for the public yet, but I hope to put it up somewhere just for show-and-tell soon.

Another big reason that drove my learning was the oppressive pecuniary pressures in the art world. I wonder if I’m ready for an entry level/junior position yet. I have no idea. Time to try looking around for a job now as well, I guess. At the very least, I’ll get a better idea of what the world wants.

I first looked at Flask and Django because people said that if I want to use Python on a webpage I’d need a web framework. Turns out, the simpler thing to learn is not a web framework but a template engine.

What is a template engine? Who the hell knows? Do you think I knew as a beginner? Why do all these tutorials call it that? Tutorials for beginners, no less. And if you want to even learn one, Jinja2 in my case, you can barely find a tutorial that focuses on it. Most Jinja2 tutorials involve a great deal of Flask.

So here’s the thing, Jinja2 is the medium that weaves between Python and a webpage on the front end. It allows us to show results from a Python function in the back end on a web page. It can’t do everything but, sometimes, it’s more than enough for us.

As far as I know, Jinja2 remains an integral part of the Holy Trinity of Flask-Jinja2-Werkzeug. Pip install Flask would get you the entire Trinity. However, you don’t need to learn all of Flask to put Python functions on the web. You do still need to import flask in your script and learn the basics of where to put your files and how to name your folders the way Flask likes it, but after that, it can be simple. Here’s an example.

In your index.html file, which must be placed in the templates folder according to Flask’s preferences, you can have a string like, say:

And that’s it. Your string on the webpage randomly displays a type of jam.

You can do other things with it, of course, and you’ll need some more knowledge to better appreciate what it can do. But my point is, for beginners to get to here, we first need to tunnel through mountains of other stuff, a lot of which is unnecessary (even if nice) simply because the current ecology of pedagogical resources don’t design for noobs.